Just a week ago we echoed a few words from the CEO of Intel, Pat Gelsinger, who at a company financial conference confirmed the good pace of work of its engineers, and confirmed the arrival of the first Intel Arc desktop graphics cards for some moment (what at this point we can clearly translate as endings) of the second quarter of this year. With that calendar, we would already be less than two months away from the long-awaited debut, even if the deadline were rushed to June 30.
Announced during the summer of 2021, when the graphics card market was still experiencing a huge shortage and a huge bubblethe Intel Arc graphics adapters, which took over from the finally unpublished Intel Xe DG2 and Intel Xe HPG, generated even more expectations than their predecessor projects, both for what Intel promised us with them, and for the effect that it could having the landing of a giant like Intel in a market then as battered as that of graphics cards.
The company announced that the first Intel Arc GPUs would hit the market in the first quarter of this year and, indeed, it did… but in a very limited way and with the countdown about to end. Today, laptops with Intel Arc GPUs can only be found in select markets and on a small selection of devices. And, for some time now, it has been rumored that the problem is not in the hardware, but in the software, in the drivers and other elements responsible for the proper functioning of the graphics.
And now as we can read in Wccftech, this same problem could cause the first Intel Arc graphics cards for desktop PCs to be delayed until the second half or even the end of summer, thus failing to meet the increasingly tight debut forecast, at the latest, at the end of June. There is quite a bit of confusion about it, with no official information to explain the situation, but today there are parties involved who say they don’t know when the Intel Arc graphics cards will actually be released.
Thus, if these reports are confirmed, we may still have to wait a few months for the arrival of the first Intel Arc graphics and, even more so, its general accessibility in all markets. If Intel is forced to launch the first units without having full confidence in their operation, we may see only a few units go on sale and in very specific markets, such as possibly Asia.
A delay on a scheduled date is always bad news. However, on the other hand it is undeniable that this is the most responsible position. Intel Arc is, strategically, a very important proposal for Intel, at a time when the technology has stepped on the accelerator again after a few difficult years. Arriving on time is important, but it is much more important to arrive well, and if it is necessary to sacrifice the first in favor of the second, I am of the philosophy that a delay is more acceptable than a false arrival.
